


The National Pastime

by Margo_Kim



Category: The Exorcist (TV)
Genre: Ambiguous Slash, Baseball, Children, Gen, Post-Case
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-16
Updated: 2018-05-16
Packaged: 2019-05-07 22:06:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14680431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Margo_Kim/pseuds/Margo_Kim
Summary: “This is home base,” Jenny said, pointing at the Frisbee by her feet. “And that’s first base, and that’s second base, and that’s third base, and that’s the pitcher’s mound, and you’ve got to run around all of them except to the pitcher’s mound, you don’t go there, and then you come back home and if no one tags you out, then that’s a run but if you do get tagged or someone catches your ball before it hits the ground or the base gets tagged if you’re not running for home, then you’re out, and when your side gets three outs, then it’s the other side’s turn to hit, and then you do that nine times until someone wins.”“Very clear,” said Marcus. He was down to his undershirt, which was already damp with sweat, and he rested the bat across his shoulders and hung his wrists over the bat. He was a long man. Tomas noticed that now and then. Long and lean, nearly as gangling as the children gabbing at him. He fidgeted the same as them as well, a sort of wild energy that set you running at the horizon with no concern for how you’d get back.





	The National Pastime

**Author's Note:**

> I was gonna stick this over in Scraps but at about two thousand words I figured it was long enough to stretch out on its own.

Somewhere in the Meyer household, Marcus found a baseball hat, shabby and grey as a rag, and he fiddled with it while Jenny and Kent pleaded with him stay with them just a little longer. Forward, backward, taking it off to scratch his head before he tugged it back on to shade his face. The Kansas sun had been brutal on him these last weeks. Samantha Meyer had been stronger in the sunlight, more herself in the fields her family had farmed for generations, and so Marcus and Tomas had exorcised her in the uninterrupted daylight of the plains. Marcus had sweated his sunscreen off when he remembered to put it on, and he never bothered to reapply it. Tomas did that for him, dragging him away from the writhing demon to force water down his throat, lotion on his skin. At night when they stopped, if they stopped, Tomas watched Marcus come back wincing to himself, to his fever-hot skin. He never noticed it during the exorcism. Pain was something that happened when the exorcism stopped.

The exorcism was over. Samantha Meyer dozed on her porch, the one her grandfather had built for her grandmother as an apology for the abuse. Her favorite part of her family home was the one a hateful man made to convince his favorite victim to stay. Now it was a place that sheltered her as she recovered from the evil done to her body, as she watched her gleeful children play. Kent and Jenny grabbed at Marcus’ hands and dragged him out with them. From the porch, all Tomas could make out was their laughter.

Marcus looked back over his shoulder at Tomas and gave him a rueful shrug. Even this far away, Tomas could see how pink Marcus’ ears were. The parts of him that weren’t burned were freckled, and the skin between the freckles was just as pale as if it had never seen any sun at all. Tomas marveled at that at night, when he forced Marcus down to rub aloe into the angriest burns.

“I’d appreciate your staying,” Samantha said drowsily beside him. Tomas had not realized she’d awoken. She smiled at him, the circles under her eyes as dark as the Kansas night when the fields and dirt roads went black and the rare houses formed their own lonely islands of light. “I can’t look after them by myself just yet.”

“We really should keep moving,” Tomas said, but it came out more a question than a statement. A shriek cut through the moment, Tomas and Samantha both snapping their heads to look, but it was reflex only. There was no terror in Kent and Jenny as they yelled and hollered, running around Marcus with the overwhelming energy of young children on a mission. “He’s never heard of baseball!” Jenny shouted at her mom. “Never ever!”

Marcus, his face half-shadowed by the brim of his baseball hat, grinned. “I know about baseball, it’s the one with the tackling and the goalposts.”

This comment was met with louder shouts, louder groans, only to be outdone when Kent sprinted over with a baseball bat nearly as tall as he was, which Marcus gripped at the bottom. “Ah, like cricket,” he said, and Jenny and Kent literally fell over onto the ground, evidently overcome at the ignorance of adults with funny accents.

“You see?” Samantha said quietly to Tomas, as Jenny and Kent leapt back to their feet, words overflowing them like prayer, like tongues as they mimed and jumped and preached the good news of baseball to the amicable heathen. “You think I could handle them in my condition?”

“I think,” Tomas said, “you have not changed your opinion of us sleeping in the truck.”

Samantha settled back in her chair. “I know a little more about damnation these days, Padre. And I’ll be goddamned if I see you boys rush off to sleep in the wilderness and fight the devil without your rest.”

“Tomas! Tomas!” Jenny and Kent cried, their feet pounding up the porch. They nearly tackled him, their hands grasping at his hands, at his legs. “We gotta teach him, we gotta, come on. Mom, he doesn’t know what  _baseball_  is, Mom, he says he’s never ever heard of it.”

“Unacceptable,” Samantha said, smiling as demons never could. She raised her eyebrows at Tomas. “You better help teach him. But you might take off the all blacks first.”

By the time Tomas had changed, quick as he could which wasn’t nearly quick enough for Kent pounding on the bathroom door, into borrowed shorts and an old tee, Jenny and Marcus had already set up the field. “This is home base,” Jenny said, pointing at the Frisbee by her feet. “And that’s first base, and that’s second base, and that’s third base, and that’s the pitcher’s mound, and you’ve got to run around all of them except to the pitcher’s mound, you don’t go there, and then you come back home and if no one tags you out, then that’s a run but if you do get tagged or someone catches your ball before it hits the ground or the base gets tagged if you’re not running for home, then you’re out, and when your side gets three outs, then it’s the other side’s turn to hit, and then you do that nine times until someone wins.”

“Very clear,” said Marcus. He was down to his undershirt, which was already damp with sweat, and he rested the bat across his shoulders and hung his wrists over the bat. He was a long man. Tomas noticed that now and then. Long and lean, nearly as gangling as the children gabbing at him. He fidgeted the same as them as well, a sort of wild energy that set you running at the horizon with no concern for how you’d get back.

Tomas wondered if this was how Marcus had been when the church bought him, or the boys home took him, or his father beat him.

Marcus caught his gaze and winked at him.

Tomas stepped close and said in a low voice so that the children, who couldn’t care less as they argued teams, wouldn’t hear, “I never thought you were so hopelessly ignorant.”

“Wait till I tell them we don’t have TV in England.”

Tomas laughed and Marcus smiled bright as an island of light.

Jenny decided that since she was older, she should be responsible for Marcus, so they were a team, and Kent got Tomas, who assured the little man that he had, of course, heard of baseball, had even played it before. “Yeah?” Marcus said at that, and Tomas thought about what they would say this evening, how Tomas would tell Marcus about the summers with his father who had loved baseball more than anything, who had dreamed of pitching in the Majors and when that had failed, had dreamed that his son would. Tomas might even mention his father’s disappointment that his son had loved football instead, a disappointment he poorly swallowed, and which made Tomas madder and madder on their increasingly infrequent phone calls, when Tomas would tell his father about his last game and his father would say nothing. It was the most enduring lesson his father taught him: that sometimes you keep secret parts of your life from the people who love you. You spare yourself the insult of tepid disappointment.

Tomas did not, as a rule, like to speak harshly of his parents to Marcus. It felt spoiled. It felt petty. Complaining to a man with no legs of a sore ankle. Tomas watched Jenny at home plate teach Marcus how to swing the bat, and wondered for the first time what other disservices Tomas had done to Marcus’ character without thinking.

He put on the glove that Kent had given him. It was older than the children, no question, maybe older than Samantha. Old as Marcus’ baseball hat, which had once been the color of blue corn. Tomas had had a glove like this, broken in until it was soft as butter and pliable as a second skin. His hand was already starting to sweat. Kent planted himself between the flower pot of first base and the left boot of second base, and assigned Tomas to stand ready by the right boot of third. Jenny was on Marcus’ team but she was also the best pitcher, Kent explained, so she’d pitch for everyone except when she was at bat, and then Kent would pitch for her, unless Tomas was good at pitching. Was Tomas good at pitching? Tomas answered honestly. He was very good at pitching.

“Then you do it,” Jenny said, taking him instantly at his word, as she had taken Marcus at his. There was no lying in baseball. She threw him the ball. He caught it. Marcus waited at home, holding the bat right side up and just how Jenny had painstakingly taught him. A breeze came rustling through, and for a moment, everyone sighed at the pleasure of it.  _Thank you, God_ , Tomas prayed, the simplest and truest prayer he’d offered all these weeks.

Tomas tossed the ball up, caught it and Marcus’ eye. Marcus smirked and raised the bat. He didn’t look like a man who’d never played before.  _Throw the ball_ , his body challenged.  _I’ll hit it._

Tomas threw the ball. Marcus hit it, with a crack like thunder, and Tomas squinted after it, as it soared over his head and disappeared into the gleam of the sun. The children screamed, Jenny shouting, “Go, go, go!” as the ball came back into sight. Tomas took off running the same time Marcus did. The ball was coming down, it was close, close, Tomas stuck out his glove as behind him Jenny and Kent, his team loyalties forgotten, whooped and told Marcus  _faster, faster, faster._

Tomas closed his glove and let the ball bounce off. Behind him the children and even Samantha cheered as Marcus rounded home. When Tomas turned around, Marcus had two children hanging off of him, two children overcome with ecstasy. One week prior, they had helped hold their mother down while she screamed they were mistakes, the worst mistakes she’d ever made, and she should have drowned them in the bath. That’s not her, Marcus had said, and when they asked how he knew that, he told them about his father, his mother, about how cruelty was something that built up over time, about how it took just as long to build up properly as love. Demons make the beautiful ugly without warning. Humans betray you so slowly you’re surprised you’re surprised.

He picked up the baseball, dusted it off on his shorts automatically, a muscle memory he hadn’t remembered he had. When Tomas came back to the pitcher’s mound—another Frisbee Jenny had so carefully placed—Marcus grinned at him. “I thought you said you were good at this,” Marcus said.

“Beginner’s luck,” Tomas replied. He gestured at himself. “I would have thought you knew all about that, working with me.”

Marcus passed off the bat to Jenny, and called to Tomas, “No such thing. If you’re good, you’re good.”

Tomas must have smiled at that too long, too quietly, because Jenny shouted, “Throw it, Tommy,” but as he’d never heard the nickname before--the accent up still up front, an American nickname of a Mexican name. And just for that small spontaneous courtesy that he had never thought to expect from the flat vowels of this flat land where the horizon stretched uninterrupted in all directions and the sun painted Marcus Keane pink, Tomas almost felt bad as he struck her out.


End file.
